SNS3Guppy - I believe that is what I am trying to do? Get out of the comfort zone and challenge myself whilst learning? I thought that counted more as experience than flying the same routes in the same airspace over and over again.
That's fine. You did say you wanted to build hours.
One can fly the same hour a thousand times, or fly a thousand different hours. One can spend the hour tottering around the valley watching the leaves change colors on the mountainside, or one can spend the hour honing and perfecting slow flight, stalls, steep turns, timed turns, and engine-out procedures. At the end of the hour, one pilot has an hour of time to put in his book, but the other pilot has solid training and experience. Which one comes away more proficient and the better stick?
Two pilots can fly an hour of landings. One simply lands and takes off again. The other holds himself or herself to a tight tolerance on airspeed, and a narrow touchdown zone. One strives for accuracy and precision, the other simply to kill an hour in order to throw it in the logbook.
For those building hours, by all means falsify the time. Make it up. Building hours is worth no more.
For those building experience, log it, treasure it, and embrace it, because it becomes a part of you and your log a journal of a life opportunity.
Two people can go on a "tour" and play; one can do it with dedication to ensuring it's a full training experience with accurate times over waypoints, adherence to altitude, precise navigation, keeping a fuel log, and an ear toward better communications. The other simply flits from place to place, tossing it in a logbook to show hours. The former comes home with 18 hours of experience, while the latter lands with something to stick in a logbook. Falsify it in that case; it's much cheaper, and certainly no less beneficial than "hour building."
Going to a new airport (or a new country) for that matter does little to enhance airmanship, proficiency, or to expand one as an aviator and pilot. It's fun, perhaps (I've never thought so), even interesting to some. It's not the touring about that does anything to develop one over the course of whatever hours are expended and expensed. It's the experience one gains in the process, and that is never a function of hours.
Simply put, hours don't correlate to experience in any way, shape, or form. What you get from those hours, of course, has everything to do with the experience you gain, and that is entirely up to you.
Hence the admonition; build experience, not hours.
The hours will come. The experience takes effort and is hard fought. Hours are the easy way out, and a natural byproduct of seeking experience.
It doesn't worth the other way around.